The Ecologist - The End Of Consumerism - Politicians "Like Drunk Drivers In Fog"

[hatrack]

EDIT

Playwright Dennis Potter said in 1994 in Seeing the Blossom: ‘The commercialisation of everything means of course you’re putting a commercial value on everything. And you turn yourself from a citizen into a consumer’. Booker Prize-winning novelist Ben Okri said in the Times in October 2008: ‘The meltdown in the economy is a harsh metaphor of the meltdown of some of our value systems. Individualism has been raised almost to a religion, appearance made more important than substance. The only hope lies in a fundamental re-examination of the values that we have lived by in the past 30 years’.

Vaclav Havel has stated beautifully the fundamental shift that is needed: ‘What could change the direction of today’s civilization? It is my deep conviction that the only option is a change in the sphere of the spirit, in the sphere of human conscience. It’s not enough to invent new machines, new regulations, new institutions. We must develop a new understanding of the true purpose of our existence on this Earth. Only by making such a fundamental shift will we be able to create new models of behaviour and a new set of values for the planet’. For Havel, our refreshingly outspoken bishops and many others, the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of the spirit.

One of my heroes, Aldo Leopold, the father of the land ethic, wrote to a friend that he doubted anything could be done about conservation ‘without creating a new kind of people’, and in the must-read A Sand County Almanac, from 1949, that ‘a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it… it implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such’. And as Professor Tim Jackson says, ‘the transition to a sustainable society cannot hope to proceed without the emergence or re-emergence of some kinds of meaning structures that lie outside the consumer realm’. Brilliant thinkers such as Dr Tom Crompton at WWF are doing crucial work on these questions. We must urgently spread the conversation.

Right now there is a terrifying vacuum of values, vision and leadership in our political discourse and from our politicians. And it’s hard for business to do the right thing when it’s designed to make money and little else, and when the market is set up so perversely. Our politicians are (to borrow a phrase from the wonderful Thomas Homer-Dixon) like drunk drivers in the fog. Harvard Professor John Quelch’s 2008 study Too Much Stuff says: ‘The mass consumption of the 1990s is fast fading in the rearview mirror. Now a growing number of people want to declutter their lives and invest in experiences rather than things’.

And Jeremy Paxman has told us that we are witnessing the ‘end of capitalism’. Our current form of corporate-consumer-capitalism has been shown to be what many of us knew it was: a fundamentally flawed system.

EDIT

http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=2214

EDIT

http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=2214

[get the red out]

1. Thank you

That was a great read. All of us need to fundamentally change, and develop a viable value system. I just hope someone can figure out how.

[GliderGuider]

2. It's already happening from the ground up, one person at a time.

Here are excepts of two articles that show that this is happening, and what the implications might be:

Red Herrings and Hope

The question for me has become, "How do we ensure that the seeds are in place for a value set that will survive through and bloom after the bottleneck, a value set that will ensure that the next cycle of civilization has a chance at sustainability even in such a badly damaged, resource-poor world?" How will we ensure that our descendants will eventually inherit a sustainable world, even though our current situation is not sustainable by any stretch of the imagination?

I've become convinced over the last couple of months that the seeds for such a transformation have already been planted. They are even resilient enough to make it through the bottleneck, and they carry the correct values for the rebirth I suggest.

American activist Paul Hawken has just written a tremendously important book called "Blessed Unrest" in which he describes a set of one to two million local, independent, citizen-run environmental and social justice groups. These groups exist world-wide, and each is acting on local problems of its own choosing. There is no overarching ideology beyond "making the world a better place", there is no unifying organization, no white male vertebrate leader setting the agenda. As a result the movement is extremely resilient - no government action anywhere can shut it down, even though individual groups may be suppressed. These groups make up the largest (though unrecognized) social movement the world has ever seen. For a glimpse of some of these organizations, take a look at the web site WiserEarth.org.

Hawken sees this movement as part of humanity's immune system. While I like the metaphor and think it is exactly correct, I believe the importance of these groups is much greater than just their efforts to mitigate an unavoidable collapse. These groups have been called into existence by the world's dis-ease, and do two things: they work to fix local problems now (which will mitigate some local effects of the collapse), but more importantly they act as carriers for the values of cooperation, consensus, nurturing, recognition of interdependence, acceptance of limits, universal justice and the respect for other life. Those are precisely the values that a civilization will need to achieve stability and sustainability. To top it all off, many of these groups are led by women or espouse specifically matriarchal values, one attribute I see as essential for any sustainable civilization.

At the risk of sounding sentimental, I call these groups the antibodies in Gaia's bloodstream.

I am convinced we will not save this civilization, and will lose a large fraction of humanity in the process. But I'm equally convinced that thanks to the seeds that have already been planted in these groups we have a shot at a much better one in a couple of hundred years. The crucial change in perspective required to see the hope in this is to stop looking from here forward into the decline, and instead look backward from a position out two hundred years and imagine what it will take to rebuild a truly sustainable civilization from the ashes of this one. The values required are already embodied in a resilient organization, enough of whose elements will survive to transmit a sustainable value set into the ecologically damaged, resource-depleted world we will bequeath to the future.

Changing the Dream

I'm now convinced that the only route that will salvage the human potential is transformation. I'm not talking about "transforming our economic system" or "achieving sustainability" here. I'm talking about a full-blown step-off-the-edge plunge into an unknown and unknowable future. I'm talking about caterpillar-to-butterfly stuff.

What takes this hope out of the realm of new-age woo-woo for me is the existence of the social movement that Paul Hawken has described in "Blessed Unrest". Hawken has characterized these eco-spiritual-social justice groups as "Gaia's antibodies", a description that I have promoted for a while now. However, after what I saw in the "Awakening the Dreamer" symposium, I think they are in fact much more than that. I think a more appropriate metaphor is that these groups are our imaginal disks -- those groups of new cells that appear spontaneously and rather mysteriously in a caterpillar's body to catalyze its metamorphosis into a butterfly.

Their value in terms of the direct effects of their work (their "antibody" function) is vastly outweighed by their value as carriers of the new paradigm, catalysts of the new thought patterns and focal points that work to spread these philosophical changes into their communities -- their "imaginal" function. "Awakening the Dreamer" is one group that fully comprehends this aspect of the unfolding changes. The reason they include the spiritual dimension in their mission statement is the same reason that many of us have started seeing the shift in spiritual terms. The change that's coming is so profound that the only way to understand and communicate it is with spiritual language.

Here's why I think this perspective is realistic, and not just another pipe dream of a transhuman singularity. The symposium screened two pieces of video by Paul Hawken. One was from 2005 or so, in which he was introducing the movement to an American audience. In that presentation he said there were about 250,000 of these groups world-wide. In an interview taped earlier this year he said there were now between one and two million of them. This means that a massive amount of value-forming is happening beyond the reach of our culture's guardian institutions. The growth rate is explosive, and given that these groups are nurturing the new world-view, that means the penetration of the transformative value system is reaching a level where it is actually permeating our culture.

Of course this will not prevent the shit from hitting the fan during the coming decades as our ecology unravels, the energy situation becomes more and more parlous, and the economy of growth self-destructs under its own weight. At this point nothing can prevent that. What this new perspective gives us is a realistic hope of humanity coming out the other side with a new culture that actually works, and a powerful reason to keep going in the face of mounting chaos.

[get the red out]

3. That's excellent!

[Old School Liberal]

4. I'm a bit pessimistic in regards to changing human instinct

We have to look at the full context of these situations. Either these communities of which you speak are ideologically pure when they form, or are small-scale. The significance of this is that man never abandons his self-interest. He rationally seeks to improve his life the most, and will do so communally when that is so. However, on a large scale laziness and getting something for nothing factor in, and there is resultant inefficiency. The reason it works for small communities is not only the fact that there is emotional connection (personal, the sort of human grouping we are evolved to appreciate) to the citizens, but also the fact that the social stigma of being a freeloader would leave the perpetrator isolated.

Man always acts rationally in regards to his self-interest, when he does not do so apparently, it is through ignorance on his own part over what's best for him (e.g. repeat criminals) or the fact that he ordinally prefers another action/benefit to an alternate one that a theorist would presume is best. People never have and never will act selflessly for everyone else; on some level he believes he benefits and rationally proceeds (e.g. suicide bombers get welfare benefits for their families/72 virgins, ideologically inclined types may believe that they are setting an example that will be followed, etc.)

The very selfish society you seek to shift from naturally formed when man realized that to band together is preferable than to risk life and limb fighting one another, and divided tasks up, which created the foundation of inequality (aside from the former Alpha-male dynamic). This utopia you're hoping for was never attempted on the grounds of such instances of The Tragedy of the Commons.

I won't deny that shifts of the human spirit have occurred--such as that of a worldview based on religion becoming one centered around commerce--but they were always rationally in line with what was presumed to be the individuals personal interest. If a shift is desired, it has to be shown how the individual benefits when he presumes the shifty intentions of those around him. Alternatively, an effective form of ensuring that everyone works to their maximum potential (higher with incentives than without) so that everyone's station is lifted, or that the benefits of living in the utopia outweigh the loss in efficiency/output and subsequently living standard and that freeloading is effectively put in check. Until that can be done, man will not have a widespread 'shift' in thinking, at least not freely.

[hunter]

5. We are a nation of freeloaders...

... we take from the earth and don't give back.

[Old School Liberal]

6. Agreed

The problem is that the freeloading off the earth won't punish us in the same way that doing so against a group of people will. Strong laws and punishments, not shifts in our worldview will cut down on this sort of abuse.

[pscot]

7. Your pessimism is probably reality based

I'm afraid that if the public at large "get religion", it's likely to be the kind that results in everyone pulling knives and looking around for a throat to cut.